Fury: Sam Fuller Lives!

[don]

aka the War Without Maps

LOS ANGELES — In the first minutes of the writer-director David Ayer’s “Fury,” about American soldiers slogging through Europe in the final days of World War II, Brad Pitt, as the tanker Don Collier, slides his knife behind the eye of a German lieutenant.

“Piercing his brainpan with a CRACK,” is how Mr. Ayer’s screenplay describes the move. (In Dolby Digital sound, it will be a very loud crack.) Mr. Pitt, our hero, then calmly wipes his blade clean on the German’s uniform.

The Good War this is not.

In what promises to be one of the most daring studio movies in an awards season that will bring several World War II films, Mr. Ayer, Mr. Pitt and a band of producers backed by Sony Pictures Entertainment are poised to deliver what the popular culture has rarely seen. That is, a relentlessly authentic portrayal — one stuntman was run through with a bayonet on the set — of the extremes endured, and inflicted, by Allied troops who entered Germany in the spring of 1945.

Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” which also starred Mr. Pitt, was brutal but surreal. Few believed that a real-life counterpart to his blood-crazed Lt. Aldo Raine had collected Nazi scalps by the hundred.

The first 20 minutes of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” came much closer to what Mr. Ayer calls the war’s “ground truth.” But little in its portrayal of slaughter at Normandy hinted at what some American soldiers would do less than a year later in their final push to victory — yes, they executed prisoners and killed armed children.

Mr. Ayer, a studio writer (“Training Day”) and indie film director (“End of Watch”), had been meditating for years on the “Fury” screenplay, but he wrote it in a burst about 18 months ago. “It sort of exploded out,” he said. “I wrote it for me.”

The resulting movie, Mr. Ayer said, was intended both as a personal journey and as a correction to the pop cultural record.

On the personal front, “Fury” is meant to unlock the psychology of Mr. Ayer’s older relations, who fought but seldom spoke of it. And the film trades on his own military experience as a sonar operator on an attack submarine in the 1980s.

“Looking back into World War II, I could see the same family I was serving with,” Mr. Ayer said. “But what they experienced was really incomprehensible to me.”

The time also seemed right for an honest look at those who were fighting and dying in ferocious encounters even as the German surrender was imminent, he said. “There is a lot of contemporary parallel here,” Mr. Ayer said, referring to soldiers who confront death in Afghanistan, for instance, even as American engagement there is supposed to be ending.

Their problem is that of Mr. Pitt’s character, known as Wardaddy, and the four tankers — portrayed by Logan Lerman, Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña and Jon Bernthal — whom he has pledged to keep alive, Mr. Ayer said.

“Nobody wants to be the last man to die in the war.”

American tank casualties during the war in Europe were horrific.

The Third Armored Division landed at Normandy with 232 M4 Sherman medium tanks, the Army’s primary armored weapon. But it had 648 tanks completely destroyed, and another 700 knocked out, as replacements and those repaired were repeatedly hit.

The armor was too thin, and the tanks were prone to burn when hit even by a hand-held panzerfaust anti-tank weapon. Crews were incinerated, and often listed as missing, not killed, because they left no remains. Commanders, peering from atop the turrets, were routinely shot in the head.

“Henry Ford built the Sherman, Ferdinand Porsche built the Tiger,” the better-armored German tank, said Bill Block, a producer whose QED International assembled and financed “Fury” while selling distribution rights to Sony, which will open the film in the United States on Nov. 14.

Many tankers, assured of the Sherman’s strength in training, only learned otherwise in combat. “Seeing our mounting tank losses made me realize that our armored forces had been the victims of a great deceit,” Belton Y. Cooper, a veteran of the tank war, wrote in the book “Death Traps,” one of many sources Mr. Ayer consulted for his script.

In Mr. Ayer’s story, the crew of a tank called Fury, one of about 10 real Shermans used in the film, have fought their way from Africa, to Normandy, across the Rhine and into Germany.

Ragged, worried, and, in the case of Mr. Peña’s Trini Garcia, almost always drunk, they can see the war’s end. But they can’t quite reach it.

As the movie opens, they are preparing to scrape the remains of a headless buddy from the bow gunner’s seat. “I sure didn’t keep him alive,” Mr. Pitt mutters.

Much of what his Wardaddy does may shock viewers who have watched American soldiers behave brutally in Vietnam War films at least since “Apocalypse Now,” but have rarely seen ugliness in the heroes of World War II.

In his harsh initiation of a new gunner, Mr. Pitt’s character crosses lines, both legal and moral. Not even Lee Marvin’s Sergeant Possum in Samuel Fuller’s “The Big Red One,” another knife killer, went quite so far.

Don Evans, a World War II tank gunner who advised Mr. Ayer, now cautions that some scenes in “Fury” are more extreme than what he witnessed in 28 months overseas. “I don’t recall anyone having to kill a buddy,” Mr. Evans said in a phone interview.

Surprisingly, Mr. Evans, who has read the script, said he was wary of the film’s thrust, adding, “I am not looking forward to seeing it.”

Yet the portrayal is grounded in years of research that left the back corners of Mr. Ayer’s office crammed with books and war memorabilia.

“He had every type of camouflage, and weapons, and uniforms,” said John Lesher, another of the film’s producers, recalling a trip to Mr. Ayer’s man cave in the Silverlake district of Los Angeles.

Through all of it, Mr. Ayer, whose grandfather was serving on a submarine at Pearl Harbor at the time of its attack and whose uncle flew B-17 missions in Europe, learned what some who had made a deep study of the so-called “Greatest Generation” already knew: American fighters were not saints.

Tom Brokaw, who wrote a book by that title, remembers being told by one veteran of the war, “After the Germans killed my brother, I never took another P.O.W. alive.”

“Remember, they were fighting a hardened enemy that glorified the SS,” Mr. Brokaw wrote in a recent email.

“It was a long, brutal war, up close and personal,” he added. “A number of veterans I interviewed alluded to behavior they weren’t proud of, but neither did they apologize.”

In the last few weeks, Mr. Ayer has been tidying up “Fury,” dropping in the last of his special effects shots and filming some brief inserts.

Mainly, the film, which cost about $80 million, was shot in Britain. Access to tanks was a prime consideration. Vintage Shermans were more readily available there. Plus, the production was permitted to use a rare, working Tiger tank, lent by the Tank Museum in Bovington.

The fetish for authenticity extended to uniforms. Most were tailor made, and battered, to avoid falling back on rentals that might be familiar to those who had seen them in films stretching back to “Battle of the Bulge” (1965), but which had little connection to the real tankers’ weathered gear, or to the surprisingly sophisticated camouflage worn by the Germans.

According to Kevin Vance, a former member of the Navy SEALs who consulted on the film and appears in it, the bayonet accident occurred when a combat scene got too real. An actor stabbed a stuntman, he explained, mistaken for a dummy lying on the ground.

“When you think about the upper chest and what that bayonet missed, it’s pretty incredible,” Mr. Vance said of a wound that proved less serious than it might have been. (The stuntman survived.)

The principal actors were considerably roughed up before filming began. Pushed by the military consultants, they spent a week on a bivouac in England — no shaves, no showers, no plumbing — learning to handle the grimy side of soldiering.
“Part of my job was to get them miserable, wet and tired,” said Mr. Vance, who supervised the boot camp.

Mr. Lerman said long sessions with Mr. Evans and other veterans brought the war’s reality home. “It was incredible to sit down with them and hear their stories directly,” he said by email.

The cast, Mr. Bernthal added, was pushed by Mr. Ayer to behave as if “this was the last movie you were ever going to make.”

Mr. Pitt’s decision to take the role of Wardaddy was a sudden one. Early last year, he read the script during a quick trip to Europe, and, on returning, immediately jumped in.

Apparently, it mattered not that Mr. Pitt’s partner, Angelina Jolie, is directing a very different World War II story, Universal’s prisoner-of-war drama “Unbroken,” which will soon be competing with “Fury” on the awards circuit. A third drama set during the war, “The Imitation Game,” starring Keira Knightley and Benedict Cumberbatch, is also expected to set an awards push from the Weinstein Company. And Sony has already released “The Monuments Men,” a more lighthearted wartime caper, that opened in February.

Fortuitously for Mr. Ayer, “Fury” was born before another of his films, “Sabotage,” ran into a wall of resistance from audience and critics alike.

An independently financed action movie, which Mr. Ayer directed and helped write, “Sabotage” starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as the leader of corrupted drug enforcement agents who begin falling to an unknown assassin. It took in just $10.5 million at the domestic box office after Open Road Films released it in March. “ ‘Sabotage’ isn’t any good,” Manohla Dargis wrote, reviewing it for The New York Times.

Albert S. Ruddy, among the executive producers of “Sabotage,” said it was still too soon to know whether Mr. Ayer would have a place with guts-and-glory greats like Sam Peckinpah, whose “Cross of Iron” was about Germans on the Russian front, or Fuller, with whom Mr. Ruddy worked.

“I’d have to know David a little while longer to compare him to Sam Fuller,” Mr. Ruddy said in a phone interview.
Mr. Ayer maintains that failure, and the experience of working on an expansive picture with a star as prominent as Mr. Schwarzenegger, made him better.

“I wouldn’t have been able to make ‘Fury’ without making ‘Sabotage,’ ” he said. “It taught me a lot about me.”

In any case, Mr. Block, whose company backed “Sabotage,” instantly purchased the “Fury” script when Mr. Ayer showed it last year to a small handful of associates, including Mr. Block and Mr. Lesher, who was a producer of “End of Watch.”

What followed was an unusual frenzy that found Mr. Block camped for three days at the Creative Artists Agency, which represents Mr. Ayer, Mr. Pitt and other actors on the film. “Almost everybody involved is a client here,” noted Bryan Lourd, a principal partner in the agency.

With Mr. Pitt on board, Universal, Paramount Pictures and New Regency Pictures fought for the project. But Sony made the first bid, and closed the deal when its president for business affairs, Andrew Gumpert, showed up, uninvited, at the agency to insist on having the last word.

One near hitch in the deal making: QED, which is backed by the Russian investors Sasha Shapiro and Anton Lessine, initially found it difficult to sell rights in Russia. Distributors there were wary of a project that portrayed Americans on a push toward Berlin, which, after all, was taken by Soviet troops.

For Amy Pascal, the chief executive of Sony’s film group, “Fury” becomes the latest in a bold series of Oscar season bids that in recent years have included “The Social Network,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “American Hustle,” “Captain Phillips” and, with Mr. Pitt, “Moneyball.”

Each, in its way, was a tough-minded film that pushed to the edge of its particular genre. None captured the big prize, a best-picture Oscar.

But all did what Mr. Ayer may do with “Fury”: jolt viewers into a fresh, and fractious, conversation about the movies and ground truth.

This time around, the subject will be those damaged tanker-heroes.

“In the end, they would hose out the blood, slap on some paint, and grab some cooks and clerks to crew up the vehicle again,” Mr. Ayer said, in an email crammed with explanations and afterthoughts.

“Sorry about the wall of text,” he added. “But this is something I’m passionate about.”

[don]

Re: Fury: Sam Fuller Lives!

In Modern War jargon, wars are conducted either as Counter-Force or Counter-Value. Counter-Force has the goal of destroying the enemy's military capability. Counter-Value has as its goal the destruction of the enemy's infrastructure.

Conflict Leaves Industry in Ashes and Gaza Reeling From Economic Toll

By JODI RUDOREN and FARES AKRAMAUG. 6, 2014


DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — For nearly four decades, Al Awda Co. has stocked Gaza’s shelves with sweets and snacks, starting as a humble refugee-camp bakery and growing into a 180,000-square-foot factory with 600 workers.

On Wednesday, all that was left was a faint whiff of chocolate amid the sour smell of a fire that burned for three days.

A barrage of Israeli artillery turned Al Awda into a charred graveyard of machinery and material. The $1.3 million German control panel that powered the place became a metal cabinet of fried wires. Some 300 tons each of sugar, flour and margarine — gone. Metal roofs collapsed, cinder-block walls had gaping holes, floors were carpeted in rubble.


“I didn’t even go to the third floor; I don’t want to see what’s there,” said Mohammed Al Telbani, 61, who founded the business in 1977. “I’m used to building. I’m not used to destruction.”

During Israel’s monthlong air-and-ground assault on the Gaza Strip, the world’s attention has focused on the more than 1,800 Palestinians killed and the more than 30,000 homes destroyed or damaged. But as a temporary truce held and talks toward a longer-term cease-fire began Wednesday, business leaders said that 175 of Gaza’s most successful industrial plants had also taken devastating hits, plunging an already despairing economy into a deeper abyss.

Ali Hayek, head of Gaza’s federation of industries, said these factories directly provided perhaps 5,000 of the most stable jobs in this impoverished Palestinian sliver, where the latest estimates of unemployment are as high as 47 percent. The collateral damage is exponential: Sabha, Gaza’s only producer of tomato paste, has contracts with 5,000 farmers, Mr. Hayek said. Legions of drivers will be without cargo. Rebuilding anything is that much harder with 63 construction companies offline, including several cement makers.

The destruction of Al Awda alone threatens its suppliers of milk, plastic wrapping, flour and cardboard boxes. Then again, Hamada, a huge flour mill in Gaza City, and Khozendar, Gaza’s only carton-maker, are also gone, Mr. Hayek said, along with 21 food companies, 10 clothing manufacturers and the entire industrial zone in the northern town of Beit Hanoun.
“After 30 days of war, the economic situation has become, like, dead,” said Mr. Hayek, whose group represents 3,900 businesses employing 35,000 people. “It seems the occupation intentionally destroyed these vital factories that constitute the backbone of the society.”

Of course making choices such as Counter-Force or Counter-Value can only be made in a one-sided conflict by the side holding the trump cards. In a situation more akin to total war, these niceties are absent.